ABSTRACT
Waiting: A Worldwide Problem Around the world, patients often wait far too long for their medical care. In Ontario, Canada, the government maintains a Web site that shows the expected delay for different types of surgery. As of April 2011, patients near Toronto could expect to wait up to 118 days for cataract surgery and 114 days for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), much longer than their target of 28 days.1 In England, the National Health Service (NHS) goal is 126 days (18 weeks) between referral and the start of treatment.2 Care delays are typically caused by a lack of capacity or budget constraints. In the United States, getting access to certain specialists can be difficult, as the average waiting time for a routine skin cancer screening appointment with a dermatologist in a given city ranged from 10 to 50 days, with the longest provider waiting times in a given city averaging 100 days, depending on the location.3 Lean methods are proving helpful in reducing the amount of time spent waiting for an appointment, as „edaCare (Appleton, WI), for example, has reduced the waiting time between referral to the first CyberKnife cancer treatment from 26 days to just 6 days.4
